Douglas Todd: To avoid stereotyping, forget being ‘colour blind’

Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun columnist03.07.2014

North American high schools tend to insist everyone is the same under the skin, instead of teaching teens to understand and appreciate cultural differences. By the time they make it to university, they understand that people are different, but don’t understand the differences, and so tend to self-segregate, says UBC social psychologist Ara Norenzayan.

But, as Norenzayan helped me realize, these well-meaning Western values may contain the seeds of a certain form of racism.

To help sort out such ethical dilemmas, Norenzayan and a global team have received $3.8 million from government bodies and the Templeton Foundation to explore moral and religious beliefs across the world. Some of their research appears in Norenzayan’s new book, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton University Press).

Before explaining more about their research, however, let’s follow Norenzayan’s thoughts on what is happening on North American campuses.

To combat stereotyping, Norenzayan says students in most North American high schools are being trained to be “colour-blind,” or, more broadly, “culture blind.”

But when these teenagers start showing up on campuses, many of them remove their blinders. They recognize people of other colours and cultures are actually, in many cases, quite different.

“The problem is that we socialize kids to treat everyone the same — out of fear they would stereotype others,” Norenzayan explains.

“Then when they encounter differences in a diverse society like ours, they don’t know what to do and difference becomes a threat. UBC is a microcosm of this issue, where students tend to self-segregate.”

Some differences aren’t obvious. Many students and faculty at B.C. universities turn out to have different cultural values (about homosexuality or women’s equality or the nature of competition) simply because they were raised in Calgary or the small town of Spuzzum.

But at UBC and SFU, where so-called “visible minorities” predominate, many people hold different values in part because they belong to ethno-cultural groups and religions rooted in far regions of the planet.

Even in such a hyper-diverse context, however, some academics try to ignore reality. They convince themselves everyone is the same. Norenzayan doesn’t get it.

“I never understood why emphasizing our common humanity means ignoring cultural differences. It’s racist to assume that others are just like us, when they aren’t.”

I constantly run into this issue covering the spirituality, diversity and migration beat, especially in Metro Vancouver, where 45 per cent of the population is born outside the country, mostly Asia.

In any given month, I will talk with ethnic Koreans, Chinese, Iranians, Filipinos, South Asians, Greeks, Algerians, Danes, Spaniards, Argentinians, Americans, Germans, Sikhs, Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, aboriginals and others; many for whom English is a second language.

Despite reporting on what seems obvious — that people from different cultures are often different — a minority of readers, including academics, have suggested they’re offended by suggestions of cultural disparateness.

Some object, for instance, to the word “foreign” being used to describe someone who is not Canadian. A few academics have claimed such terms foster a sense of “otherness,” which they confusingly equate with stereotyping.

Some other readers object by simply declaring: “We’re all humans.” They’re claiming, falsely, that pointing out cultural differences is “subtly racist” because it denies someone’s humanity.

On the contrary, pretending we are all ultimately the same, even “under the skin,” is culturally insensitive. Worse, it’s not reflective of reality.

As Norenzayan says: “If anyone thinks that acknowledging differences is racist, then I have some homework for them.”

The “homework” he refers to is an article in Pacific Standard science magazine, which highlights the emerging global research of Norenzayan’s colleague, Joe Heinrich.

In the article, titled “Why Americans are the weirdest people in the world,” science author Ethan Watters describes how Heinrich discovered conducting field studies in Peru that people hold onto radically different inner values.

People literally view reality differently, Heinrich discovered. Through experiments with optical illusions, Heinrich found Peruvians’ visual perceptions contrasted with those of North Americans.

Trained in economics, Heinrich also found through “fairness” experiments that people in some parts of the world have values about money, morals, trust and power that clash with general Western values.

After conducting such global experiments, the Pacific Standard describes how Heinrich tried to get a job in UBC’s anthropology department. Some interviewers were appalled at his research. He even remembers the word “unethical” being thrown at him.

What invisible ideological academic wall had Heinrich crashed into?

Watters has a theory.

“Challenge liberal arts graduates on their appreciation of cultural diversity and you’ll often find them retreating to the anodyne notion that under the skin everyone is really alike,” Watters writes.

“If you take a broad look at the social science curriculum of the last few decades, it becomes a little more clear why modern graduates are so unmoored. The last generation or two of undergraduates have largely been taught by a cohort of social scientists busily doing penance for the racism and Euro-centrism of their predecessors.”

As a result of their collective “post-colonial” guilt, Watters says many academics stopped admitting cultural differences actually exist.

The good news for the cause of realistic research into diversity is that Heinrich eventually found a home in UBC’s social psychology and economics departments. He joined up with Norenzayan and a new team and has the funds to do innovative research from the Congo to Fiji.

I can’t do justice to their scientific work here. But they are striving to overcome a big problem in the social sciences. That is that virtually all the subjects tested to date in social-science studies have been Westerners.

As a result, researchers are coming to grand conclusions about the nature of humans based almost entirely on Western experimental subjects; particularly American undergraduate students.

To make their case that such young Western subjects are giving researchers a skewed view of supposedly unified human nature, Heinrich, Steven Heine and Norenzayan published a groundbreaking report in the prestigious journal, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

It’s titled “The Weirdest People in the World.”

By “weird” the researchers mean both unusual and “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.”

The researchers suggest it’s arrogant for Westerners to draw sweeping conclusions about human nature, and even the structure of the human brain, based on only “weird” people.

What does this mean for multiculturalism-promoting North Americans, who are different in their own “weird” ways?

Norenzayan acknowledges we have to face the hard truth of Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam’s extensive research, which uncovered that people in ethnically diverse regions tend to become more mistrusting.

“I grew up in Lebanon,” he says, “which is one of the most diverse societies in the Middle East. And look at what’s happened there.” Ethnic and religious differences have led to civil war.

But Norenzayan holds hope. He thinks the multicultural way forward is for people to stop being “culture-blind” — and to be more “curious” about deep cultural differences.

As Herman Daly and John Cobb urge in their classic book, For the Common Good, the ultimate global challenge calls people to transcend their different cultural values and cooperate in a “community of communities.”

That, however, is far easier said than done. But I’ll explore some ways to attempt it in a future column.

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